


Brandon of the Bloody Blade

by crossingwinter



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M, The World of Ice and Fire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-15
Updated: 2015-09-15
Packaged: 2018-04-20 16:07:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4793837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is said that Brandon the Builder was descended from Garth Greenhand by way of Brandon of the Bloody Blade.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brandon of the Bloody Blade

_A thousand tales are told of Garth, in the Reach and beyond.  Most are implausible, and many are contradictory.  In some he is a contemporary of Bran the Builder, Lann the Clever, Durran Godsgrief, and the other colorful figures from the Age of Heroes. In others he stands as ancestor to them all._

_-_

_A few of the very oldest tales of Garth Greenhand present us with a considerably darker deity, one who demanded blood sacrifice from his worshippers to ensure a bountiful harvest. In some stories the green god dies every autumn when the trees lose their leaves, only to be reborn with the coming of spring.  This version of Garth is largely forgotten._

_-_

_It is said that Brandon the Builder was descended from Garth Greenhand by way of Brandon of the Bloody Blade._

_-_

_Brandon of the Bloody Blade, who drove the giants from the Reach and warred against the children of the forest, slaying so many at the Blue Lake that it has been known as Red Lake ever since._

* * *

* * *

 It takes a great deal to slay a giant.  Great strength and skill, it is said, far more of both than it takes to kill a man. That is what they say Brandon has. Brandon Giantsbane, Florys called him when he pushes the last of the giants north.  Brandon Giantslayer.

It is hard to slay a giant. That much is true. They are large and strong, but they are slow, and Brandon is quick, and slices at their ankles with his sword so that they fall and their heads are nearly at a level with his.

Then it is not so hard to slay a giant.  Then it is not so difficult.

*

What the men don’t say is that it is harder by far to slay a child of the forest. They are fast, and small, and quick, and fade into the woods with their skin like a dappled fawn’s, and sometimes Brandon thinks he hears the trees whispering to them, telling them where he is. It is harder as well, for when he slays a child of the forest, for a moment he forgets that it isn’t human. It should not be that way. It is no man, no more than the giants, but giants do not look like children and Brandon has too many younger siblings not to remember the fear that jolts through his heart when one of them falls from a tree and perhaps they’ll just have twisted an ankle but perhaps they’ll have twisted their neck.  

It is something that Brandon pushes aside—that they remind him of his siblings as he swings his bloody blade.  Their holy trees had been burned long before, and as they scream that he breaks the pact, he breaks the pact, it does not matter.  No one will ever know what became of them, and when night falls, the lake will be his sister’s. It will be Rose’s, his favorite of all of his father’s children, and the woods that grow too close shall be burned back that she may build a castle by its reeds.

*

Brandon of the Bloody Blade, his siblings call him when he returns to their father’s empty hall in the dead of winter.  It is Rose who gives him the name, kissing him on each cheek and declaring that Blue Lake shall be known as Red Lake hereafter, in honor of her brother’s valiance and the blue waters running with the blood of the children.  Gilbert drinks to it, giving Brandon the finest vintage of his wine, and Ellyn feeds him honeycomb and weaves flowers through his hair.

“You look like father,” John says, and when Brandon stares into his wine, he sees it is true. His beard is long, and grown wild in the days since he left the lake.  Matted with blood, though not his own blood.  And the flowers are dried and dead, the way their father’s crown is dried and dead when they lay him in the ground come autumn and slit the throats of ten old men and ten old women to water his grave that when the days grow longer he might rise again and he will spread his bounty everywhere.

“Father would be proud of you,” Rose says, wrapping an arm around his waist. 

_That is true, little sister_ , he thinks. His father has a taste for blood. And so too, it seems, does Brandon.

*

In his dreams, he used to slay giants.  Brandon Giantsbane would ride north and drive the giants into the hills. Now he kills children. Not children of the forest with their queer eyes and their dragonglass arrows.  Little children, with golden hair like Owen’s, or blue eyes like Maris’, and a laugh like Rowan’s.  Brandon of the Bloody Blade kills children in his dreams, and when he wakes, he wonders if he is less a human than the giants and children of the forest he’s slain.

Do they dream of killing their own?

*

Garth rises again. He always does, and will so long as they remember to bleed for him.

“Brandon slew children of the forest for me, father,” Rose tells him, kissing his cheek. His father’s beard is lank and full of dirt.  In summer there will be flowers growing in the dirt that settled there when the blood had dried.

When Rose’s lips come away, they are speckled with dirt. It looks like dried blood, and Brandon shudders.

Father looks at Brandon, and Brandon looks at father. 

Of all Garth’s children, Brandon has always thought he looks the least like their father. His face is long, and his hair is darker than that of any of his siblings, closer to black than to Foss’ chestnut brown. He might look a little like Bors, but Bors with every passing year looks less like Brandon. Brandon is lithe and quick. Bors is muscled like a bull, perhaps from drinking his bull’s blood.  Bors Bull’s Blood and Brandon of the Bloody Blade.  Florys with her birthing blood and Owen’s shields spattered with the blood of selkies and merlings, and their father from whose blood and mud beard springs little white flowers each summer.

“May their corpses make the land fertile,” their father says, his voice booming though it is not yet full. It is an echo of what it will be when the cold is truly gone.

Brandon wonders if Garth Greenhand even cares that his son broke the pact.

*

His dreams grow darker through spring and summer.  It is now his siblings he kills, Rowan and Ellyn and Rose, Bors and Owen, Harlon and Herndon, Foss, Maris, Florys and Gilbert.  Last of all he slays John, whose eyes go dark and whose dying words are, “’Twas unchivalrous of you.  To break the pact.  You are an oathbreaker. You are a kinslayer.”

When he wakes, it is autumn, and it is time to kill his father again.  And when they lay his father’s corpse in the ground again, Brandon knows he will not be there when he wakes.  He will never see his father again.  Brandon will be long gone, and only tales of his Bloody Blade will remain.

*

It’s his dreams that take him north.  Waking dreams, he would call them, if he did not know they were truly dreams. He knows that Rose sometimes dreams of birds, the great winged cranes that stand among the reeds on the lake he gave her.  She flies with them in her dreams.

His dreams are not like those, at least he doesn’t think they are.  He does not occupy the mind of a bird, or a bear, or a dog. He sees a raven, feathers like shiny black stone flying north.  It turns and looks at him sometimes, and crows at him.

“I know what you did, Brandon,” it says to him.  “I know why.”

Sometimes he wakes after that, his sweat cold.  Sometimes, he keeps on dreaming.  “Would you repent?” it asks him.

He never knows how to answer, and in his silence, it knows.  It seems to know everything, this raven.  “North,” it tells him.  “You have purpose. North.  You’ll pay in sweat and blood.”

Once he might have been afraid of that.  In the dreams where he protests, where he swings his bleeding blade at the raven, the feathers he cuts are not black, they are blue and it is Rose lying bleeding at his feet.

*

The winter is harder out of the Reach, and the farmers seem to know nothing at all of his father’s bounty. They bleed their sacrifices before their trees, and sometimes, in the woods, he thinks he sees the face of a child. He shivers in his sleep, wrapped in furs, lying on top of his pack as best he can to keep himself off the snow. And his dreams send him farther north.

North across rivers, north through marshes where he imagines Rose’s cranes would thrive, north over endless snow.  North and the straps holding his cloak to his shoulders freeze and fray, and fall away. North, and the skies are so clear when the sun shines that the white of the snow burns his eyes, and nearly blind him even when it is dark.  On he presses, and the snow passes the tops of his boots and at night, he hears the howling of wolves, singing to the moon and stars and he wonders how far north his dreams will take him.

*

The answer is a little hill near a forest where he sees a great tree growing, its bark pale as bone and its leaves red like blood.  But, more than that, there is a hot spring at its base, water steaming against the cold, and Brandon removes his clothes and sinks into the water, letting warmth wash over him for the first time in too long.  He rubs dirt and sweat and blood from his hands and legs, and combs his beard free of its matting and when he is done he just sits in the water, loathe to pull himself out and feel the air like icy needles on his skin.

It is then that he feels a blade at his throat.  It is a warm blade, of dragonglass and he knows that this will be the end. He has washed his sweat and blood away, and now his life will be taken in payment for those he slew at a different pool of water far to the south.

“I am ready,” he breaths, and he thinks that he hears the trees whisper.  _Brandon_.  It is a whisper, not his father’s booming call. He wonders if in spring he will waken like his father, or if he is too far gone, or perhaps he’s never had enough of his father’s magic.

“Are you?” This isn’t the voice in the winds, or even the battle song of a child of the forest. 

It is a woman’s voice.

“And why are you so ready to die?”

And just like that, he’s not.  She may hold a dragonglass dagger, but he is Brandon of the Bloody Blade, Brandon Giantsbane. If he has blood to pay, it is not to this woman, for she is no child of the forest.  She is not the herald of his repentance. 

He grabs her wrist before she can cut and with one swift movement he pulls her over his shoulder and into the water, twisting her, holding her.  She is strong, and fast, and fights, but he has always been quick and has brought giants to their knees. 

“Who are you?” he asks.

“You’re in my pool.” It is not an answer, and his grip tightens at her wrist. 

“Who are you?” he repeats.

“You should be telling me who you are.  You are in my pool.” She struggles again and he can half-see her face.  Her skin is pale, as are her eyes.  Pale and shining like steel, and hard as the winter.

He releases her, and takes a step away.  She is beautiful, he thinks.  There is color to her cheeks, a wind-whipped red that would have made Florys jealous. Her hair is black like his, and her lips are chapped, but full. 

“I am Brandon of the Bloody Blade,” he tells her.  He could have simply said Brandon, or Brandon Gianstbane if he’d wanted to, but Brandon Giantsbane did not have dreams that dragged him north.

Her eyes narrow. “And what house are you?” she asks.

“I am from the south,” he says.

“What house?”

“I have none.” His brothers and sisters had all laid claim to their father’s lands.  Brandon never had.  He’d wanted glory and renown.

Her eyebrows fly up. “No house, but a bloody blade?” she asks.

“Garth’s Son, if you’d like,” he says.

“Garth has many sons. I know of none called Brandon.”

“Brandon Giantsbane?” He tries, hoping, but she shakes her head. 

Her hair is long, and it floats on the surface of the spring, rippling and in the water.

“And who are you?” he asks one last time, and this time, she responds.

“I am Lorra. Lorra the Last.”

“The last?”

“The last Stark.” Brandon has not heard the name Stark before, but it is a name and he supposes that is enough.

“I am sorry,” he says, though he does not know what for.  It is lonely to be on one’s own, he supposes.  That he has learned in the snow.  She stares at him, her head tilted to one side, her grey eyes still shining, but less like steel and more like silver.

“Why are you so ready to die?” she asks him again.

He sighs and closes his eyes, and he sees Rose’s lake red with blood once again. “I broke the Pact,” he says. “I must pay in blood and sweat.” He hears a sharp intake of breath and finds he cannot open his eyes.  He cannot bear to look at Lorra the last Stark as he confesses. Though he is naked as the day he was born, he is more bare to her in these words than in his own flesh.

“The dreams drove me north,” he continues, his eyes still closed. 

“Wolf dreams?” she asks, “Or tree dreams.”

He opens his eyes. “Neither,” he says. “I dreamed of a raven.”

“Of a raven? Or in a raven?”

“Of.”

She sighs, then climbs from the hot spring, pulling her soaking furs around her. She stares at the carved face of the tree.  “You send him to me?” she asks.  He thinks he hears the trees whisper, but he cannot understand their words.  Then she shakes her head and she turns back to him.

“Come with me.”

And he does.

*

He sleeps on the floor by a fire pit in Lorra’s stone house.  It’s a large stone house not too far from the tree, and it is empty. He sees doors, behind which are rooms that must once have held life but which stand firmly closed.

He does not dream that night.  Or rather, he does not dream of the raven, and of dead children.  He dreams of snow and the howling of wolves and the way that Lorra’s clothing had stuck to her body when he’d pulled her into the spring.

*

Lorra is the Last Stark. He does not know what that means, so she tells him.  She’d had brothers and a father and sisters—all older than she.  Her sisters had married and taken the names of their husbands. Her brothers had wed and brought their wives into the stone house.  They’d had children, and there had been laughter and warmth, even in the dark of winter. 

But there was darkness to the north.  Lorra did not like to speak of it.  First her father had gone to face it, but he had not come back.  Then her brothers Bennard, Rickan, and Edwyle had gone north as well and they had not come back.  Other brothers, Royce and Jonnel and Willam went south, fighting off the Barrow Kings who claimed the lands that had once belonged to her vanished father, and they did not return.  Their sons grew ill and did not survive the winter, and their wives went back to their homes across the land, not wishing to live with the ghosts of their families, leaving Lorra completely alone in a house that was too big for her. 

She hunts, snow hares and venison and boar if she dares get near it.  She has a bow that arcs and arrows fletched with black feathers and weapons of steel, but she does not carry them.  “Men are not so dangerous,” she says, “Especially not if you can sneak on them.  And dragonglass kills just as well.  Better, in some cases,” but she does not elaborate upon that point. 

It is easy for Brandon to see that she is lonely.  She is young as well, younger than he is, but he does not know how old he is. He has never felt older than he does now. Perhaps his father and the blood kept him young.  Now he thinks he sees traces of grey in his beard.

Every day, she goes to the sacred tree by the hot spring and prays.  Brandon doesn’t follow her.  He only ever prayed to his father, but his father is far away. He will not pray to the gods of the slain.

He uses her needles and some thread to sew his cloak back together, and patch his ragged clothing. He takes the steel hanging on the wall and helps her hunt for food.  But he does not leave her alone in the house.  His dreams have stopped and he must pay in blood and sweat. He had not thought it would be to this woman, but he knows better than to complain about it.

*

For three years he stays in the house of Lorra Stark.  Three cold winters, three summers that are more like the early spring of home than like the hot days with the sun crushing overhead and Gilbert’s wine and his father’s raucous laughing and dancing.  Sometimes he thinks of his siblings.  Do Harlon and Herndon still share their bride?  Does Maris still hide in the High Tower?  Does John think him unchivalrous still, though he did his best to repent, or would his brother forever condemn him?  Does his father miss him?   Does Rose understand what he had done for her?

For three years, he sleeps on the floor by her fire.  He repairs snow damage to the house.  For three years he sings her songs from the Reach, tells her of the prayers they gave to his father, of Florys’ three husbands and Rose’s cranes. For three years he works, and on the first day of the fourth year, he wraps his broken cloak around her shoulders before her sacred tree and they wed

*

He would not know how to describe it.  He knows his brothers have loved, and his sisters too.  Florys and her three husbands, Herndon and Harlon and their shared bride. He knows his father has known many women, and some men too to hear the tales.  But love?

He cannot say that he loves Lorra the way his family loves.  Never has he heard them describe a warmth that stems from the heart more than the loins.  Or perhaps they’ve felt it, but never shown it.  He doesn’t know.

He must love Lorra, though. She is his warmth in winter, and her laughter makes him forget any ill he’s done.  She is beautiful, and willful, and as vibrant as a blooming rose in the middle of the white and greys of winter.

*

It is their wedding that changes everything. 

Some changes are to be expected.  Brandon no longer sleeps on the floor, but in Lorra’s arms.  Like his father, his seed plants readily within her and soon she swells with his babe. He spends evenings carving little toys for the thing, and wondering what the babe shall be named.

Some changes are less expected.

Lorra had told him of the self-styled Barrow Kings to the south.  He had passed their great barrows while he trekked north. The Barrow Kings had claimed the Stark lands to the south, had driven Lorra’s father to this stone house by the sacred tree.  And when he had gone, and her brothers had gone, the Barrow King had decided he should let Lorra live the rest of her days alone, for what threat was a girl alone in the wilderness, far from the people who had once been her strength?

But somehow news of Lorra’s husband spreads and the Barrow King sends warriors to their stone house. “Kill the girl,” the Barrow King says, “before the babe is born.  And if the babe is born, kill the babe.  Kill the husband too.”

Brandon learns this when he slays the warriors—each and every one.  They tell him in hopes that he will spare them.

He doesn’t.

It is an easier thing to slay a man than a giant or a child.

*

He gives Lorra two girls, Lya and Ana, over the course of the next ten years, and the heads of near a thousand men from the Barrowlands.  He builds a ringwall around her stone house and plants trees around her weirwood that will flower in spring and bring a taste of his home to hers.

When Lorra carries his third child, the dreams come again, and everything comes to an end.

*

“We have your blood and sweat,” the raven tells him as he dreams.

“Then why have you come back?” he asks, swinging his sword at it.  But he misses, and the raven takes wing and flies to a branch of Lorra’s sacred tree.  “I have paid my debt.”

“No,” the raven squawks at him.  “You have given your blood and sweat.  That was for the blood and sweat you took.  Next you must give your life, for the lives you took.  Only death can pay for death.”

In his dream, Brandon drives his blade at the raven, but the raven disappears and it is through Lorra’s heart that he stabs.  Normally, his dreams end after he stabs one of his siblings, but he watches in horror as Lorra’s grey eyes fill with pain then fade, and her blood coats his sword and he cannot bear to pull it out of her for then he’ll see her blood on his blade.

He wakes with a start, Ana wriggling between him and Lorra and when she looks at him, and smiles, his heart shatters.

*

He does not leave, though his dreams become more persistent.  Indeed, his dreams become so gruesome that there are days where he cannot look at Lorra, since she dies on his blade every night. 

“Why now?”he asks one night as he cradles her lifeless form in his arms.  “Why now?”

“Because you were happy,” the raven tells him.  “Because we have your blood.”Brandon has not bled since he came north, and suddenly he realizes. 

_Lya_.  _And Ana.  And the third_.

“The boy,” the raven croaks. “Your blood.”

And Brandon knows he will never know his son.

*

He leaves at nightfall, after he’s set the girls to bed.  To Lya he gives a bow.  She is old enough to carry one now, and someone will need to help Lorra hunt. He hopes it will not come to her defending the stone house from the Barrow King, but he knows that is unlikely. He sings one last song to Ana, who is fretful, before he goes and wraps himself in the same cloak he wore north from the Reach.  It is not heavy, but he will not be wearing it long.

“I dreamed,” he tells Lorra quietly when she sees him donning it, and he sees her grey eyes flicker with understanding. 

“I thought as much,” she sighs.  “For how long now.”

He rests a hand on her swollen stomach, and she grimaces.  He sees determination in her face, but there is also an emptiness there, for he, like her father, like her brothers and sisters leaves never to return and she knows it.

He kisses her, and though he is desperate to taste her one last time, to have this more than the corpse Lorra of his dreams be his final memory of her, she is still beneath his lips. Does he imagine the thumping from within her stretched skin as he kisses her one last time?

He leaves her, leaves them all, and goes out into the dark winter night.  He walks a day and a night until he finds a great tree, and he sits down beneath it, shivering.  He wonders briefly if he will be remembered, if there will be songs about him as there are songs of his father.  He wonders if he will be known for the giants, or for the sweat and blood, or if part of his payment is to fade away to nothingness, such that no man will ever know he even existed, much less what good or ill he did.  They are not pleasant thoughts, so he thinks of something else, thinks of Rose’s smile, and Lya’s quick wit and Ana’s sweet voice and Lorra—Lorra most of all, and slowly he lets himself fall asleep.

*

Lorra lives.

She does not laugh anymore, but she lives, with her daughters, Lya Black Arrow and Ana Dawn Song, and her son, Brandon Stark, who climbs in the trees and fits branches together to make toys.  First he makes little poppets that he sets in rows, and wills to life with his imagination and the incantations that his mother learned from the father he never knew.

As he grows bigger, and stronger, he carves.  He builds.


End file.
